A portal is a computerized framework integrating information, applications, utilities and other elements. A portal usually provides an access point, often in the form of a web-based user interface, and is designed to aggregate and optionally to personalize information through application-specific components, optionally referred to as portlets. A portal may be a publicly available portal, or an enterprise-portal, intended only for the enterprise employees and associates.
A common problem associated with maintaining a portal relates to the addition of new applications, and sometimes also to the enhancement of existing applications. The new or enhanced applications have to be made accessible from the existing graphic user interface (GUI), and should be connected to the relevant contents.
For example, if a Geographic Information System (GIS) is added to an existing system, it should be made available to all relevant applications, such as employee directory in order to present the address of a current employee, a store location page in order to show the store locations on a map, or the like.
Thus, some association has to be made between the new application and each of the relevant existing ones, including remotely relevant ones.
Further, the added application should be activated with the relevant information, such as the address of the employee, a relevant part number in a warehouse management application, or the like.
Another aspect of the problem is that often, the real-estate, i.e., the available display area or the relevant part thereof is already fully used, and the addition of a new control for activating the new application may necessitate the evacuation of another one. A similar situation may occur when the number of available applications outperforms the available display area. In yet another situation, the display area may be too loaded for a user to even notice the newly available application.
Thus, new and useful applications may go unnoticed by users, who are therefore not getting the benefits of the development efforts invested by the organization.
All the abovementioned problems increase the Total Cost of Development (TCD) and also the Total Cost of Ownership (TCD) of applications in a portal. Experience demonstrates that sometimes more significant resources are required for integrating a new application in an environment than those required for the development of the application.
There is thus a need in the art for a method and apparatus for integrating new or enhanced applications into complex environments such as portals. The method and apparatus should enable such integration at minimal manual work, both on the connectivity between the new application and the existing ones, and on the user interface of the integration.